Uniqueness, Self Belonging and Intercourse in Nature - new version

Scientific Paper
Title	Uniqueness, Self Belonging and Intercourse in Nature - new version
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Marvin Eli Kirsh
Keywords	evolution, origin of life, unified theory of nature, affinity, chromatin folding and shape, correspondances in nature, einstein, energy, entity, force, intercourse, mass, nature is heterogeneous, nu
Published	2009
No. of pages	28

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Biological organization is discussed within a holistic framework . A new orientation is presented of natural processes with an approach in model construction that is focused strictly on physical form and centered away from abstractions that escape the perceptual senses, lead towards the postulation of non-verifiable and non-witnessible entities. A universal construction composed of first perspective representations of path, witness as unique loci in volumes of space delineated as surfaces that are rendered from planar projections, themselves projections from the coordinates of linear motion. A dynamic heterogeneous unit structure as a shape, existing at all loci, is shown to be emerging in both volume and number in a natural set, Natures' Set, confined in test to the descriptive elements uniqueness, self belonging, self avoiding, emerging. Conceptual and physical form, self belonging, and non self belonging respectively, are proposed to exist in a unique shape that can be generated graphically.. Memory, reduced in definition to the quality of path, is accounted for biologically as energy-matter transformation: the existence of DNA (a likewise linear set of loci from which surfaces and volumes are ultimately rendered) is attributed as 'a piece of energetically active path' arising as a failure of (path possessing) energy to find a ground state within a course outlined by a geometrical inversion of inside and out that is inherent to the presented model.. An accounting of the universe, the existence of life, DNA, is suggested to entail a shape as a primary universal.

Overview

Marvin E. Kirsh, an anthropologist at California State University Los Angeles, offers here a work of natural philosophy rather than of physics or biology in the ordinary sense. It proposes that the deepest divisions in modern science — mind against matter, self against nature, Special Relativity against General Relativity, the biological organism against the "string of information" said to specify it — are all the same division, and that all of them arise from a single methodological habit: building theories out of entities that no observer can witness. In their place Kirsh proposes to construct a description of nature using only what he calls first-person witnessible elements, reduced to three: uniqueness, force or self-avoidance, and emergence. These he calls "Natures' Set."

The constructive part of the paper is an attempt to derive a single ubiquitous shape — the egg — as the physical and conceptual universal at once. Space, on this account, is "the evolution of a volume containing surface from energy emitted in a bi-planar fashion from motion along a line," and a graphical construction using sine and cosine functions, with a variable speed of light standing in for the energy expended in emission, produces an egg-shaped volume after more than 10¹³ periods. DNA is then read not as a message but as "a piece of energetically active path" — a residue left behind when path-possessing energy fails to reach a ground state. This inverts the usual biological narrative: life is not an addition to inert matter but the debris of a near-universal exhaustion, so that "birth and death ... are inverted temporally such that the final cause, near extinction, determines physical structure."

The argument

Self-belonging as the criterion

The paper's organizing device is Russell's distinction between sets that belong to themselves and sets that do not. Kirsh takes it as diagnostic rather than paradoxical: "only sets of unique concepts can contain themselves," while "the list of non self belonging things is necessarily a list of the physical." His illustration is deliberately homely — the set of ordinary grasses is not itself a grass, and the set of living things is not alive — but nature, taken either as a concept about physical volumes or as a volume composed of volumes, does belong to itself on both readings. That double self-belonging is the bridge he wants between mind and matter.

Since every volume in nature sits inside a larger volume, he draws the inference that "at least one element is always present that is unwitnessible by at least one other element — i.e. the containing element." Theory-building must therefore start from concepts available to a first-person witness and must not become inductive in a way that renders it untestable.

Affinity and its insufficiency

A long discussion treats "affinity" — love, avoidance, sexual attraction on one side; enzyme–substrate fitting and DNA base pairing on the other — as a term genuinely shared by the social and the natural sciences. Kirsh argues that affinity is universal as the "motive force" of emergence but that precisely because it is everywhere it explains nothing: "Affinity and fitting, innate to all aspects of the natural world thus do not explain it." Ordinary usage treats affinity as temporally transverse — a snapshot across a moment — whereas a valid description of emergence must be longitudinal, running along the whole temporal path. Mixing the two, he holds, is what corrupts biology into a metaphysics of identity full of paradox, and what leads to a picture of organisms as strings rather than whole volumes: "A life form built physically of strings of information may be conjectured not to exist."

Natures' Set and its test

The proposed descriptive set is

Natures' Set = [Uniqueness, Avoidance/Force, Emergence]

each member entailing the others. Table 1 runs each through the self-belonging test. Uniqueness passes: a set of unique things is itself unique, as the set of natural numbers is unique because each number is. Emergence fails: something that emerges thereby assumes a new identity, so the original set cannot emerge. Self-avoidance fails: avoidance requires two members exerting force on one another, and "a single unique set cannot avoid itself." So uniqueness alone is self-belonging, which places it on the conceptual side of the divide while force and emergence sit on the physical side.

From this Kirsh draws his sharpest conclusion about information. "String of information" is "both physical and conceptual and does not withstand the test for self belonging" — as a concept it is physical, as a physical element it is conceptual — so a faithful description of nature "cannot entail a distinct category for information/information string," only a category for a unique distributable form. The number system is excluded from Natures' Set by a similar move: self-avoidance entails the number 2 but not 1, and a description must entail the whole number system or none of it. Number, on this view, is "a manifestation from the first person perspective"; infinity is "descriptive/lingual" with "no relevance scientifically."

The egg as universal form

The physical model follows. Because a universal form must be built from path, and path from motion, Kirsh takes the equations of relativity and the laws of motion as candidates — but rejects a constant c, since a universal constant is incompatible with a universe possessing number only where empirical testing occurs: "In order to render the velocity of light a physical reality it must be considered relative rather than constant, to possess an open value." Figure 2b projects an egg-shaped surface from radiation (2ΔC) emitted by motion along a line (ΔV + 2ΔC); Figure 2a plots the resulting closed egg from a line 2cos θ + sin θ with 2cos φ generating the surface at each point, where cos θ represents the change in light velocity (energy consumed in transmission) and sin θ the velocity of the emitting mass. The very large number of half-turns required is likened to the half-twist of a Möbius strip, giving a continuous inside-to-outside surface — the "geometrical inversion of inside and out" of the abstract.

Biological structure is then rendered as nested, intercoursing egg-shaped volumes, each gene "a nested, independent, specifically metabolically active spatial egg shaped volume," with the apparent orchestration of replication, transcription and translation reduced to ratios of process lifetime to process volume. Genetic "information" becomes an artifact of the vast disparity between the timescale on which a codon acts and the timescale on which species-specific DNA endures.

The Sand Boa case

The paper's one contact with an empirical dispute is the sand boas (Eryx: Boidae), in which live-bearing and egg-laying species coexist despite very different reproductive physiology. Kirsh reads this as showing that "neither type of birth, nor the specific aspects of DNA evolution into information sequences are the essential characteristics of speciation," and that "inherited physical proximities are the ultimate modulator of variation" — reproduction mode being a plastic, secondary feature rather than a component of species identity.

Assessment

There is a serious and recognizable philosophical instinct at the centre of this paper. The complaint that biology has slid from using the information metaphor to believing it — treating an organism as a string rather than a volume — is a real one, made independently by philosophers of biology who would not otherwise share Kirsh's premises. The observation that "affinity" does explanatory work in both the social and the natural sciences without being the same kind of thing in each is well posed. The transverse/longitudinal distinction is a genuinely useful way of naming the difference between a snapshot correlation and a developmental history. And the reading of DNA as an energetic residue rather than a designed message, with life falling out of a failure to reach ground state rather than as an addition to inert matter, is an arresting inversion — one that gestures, without saying so, at the thermodynamic dissipation accounts of the origin of life.

The difficulties are correspondingly serious. The largest is that almost nothing in the paper is defined operationally. "Emergence," "path," "intercourse," "volume," "heterogeneity" and "witnessibility" carry the whole argument, and each shifts register between paragraphs — "path" is at various points a trajectory in space, a history in time, the DNA molecule, and the coordinate line generating a surface. Because the terms are not fixed, the self-belonging tests in Table 1 cannot be checked: whether emergence "belongs to itself" depends entirely on which of these senses is in play, and the paper's justification (that an emerging thing assumes a new identity) is a verbal move, not a set-theoretic one. Russell's criterion is a formal property of well-specified sets; applied to informal categories it yields whatever the reader's construal supplies.

The second difficulty is that the physical construction does not connect to measurement. Making c variable is not a small adjustment — the constancy of the speed of light in vacuum is among the most precisely tested facts in physics, with modern optical-clock and resonator experiments constraining directional and time variation of c to parts in 10¹⁷, and c is now fixed by definition in the SI. Kirsh gives no magnitude for Δc, no regime in which it would show, and no reason connected to evidence for abandoning constancy other than that a universal constant is uncongenial to his scheme of number. The egg construction itself is a parametric plot: choosing coefficients that produce an ovoid curve demonstrates that such a curve can be written down, not that the coefficients correspond to light emission from a moving mass. No prediction follows — no size, no timescale, no measurable consequence — and the claim that "more than 10¹³ periods" are needed before the shape appears is stated without showing why that number matters physically.

The third is that the biological argument does not do what it claims. The sand boa case is real — Lynch and Wagner's 2009 paper on reversal to oviparity in Eryx is correctly cited — but it is a well-studied problem in phylogenetics with a conventional resolution (reproductive mode is labile and has reversed), and nothing in it requires abandoning sequence data as a criterion of relatedness. Kirsh's inference that DNA sequence "cannot be viewed as an intrinsic characteristic in classifications involving temporally oriented emergence" is a far stronger conclusion than the example supports, and it sits against the routine success of molecular phylogenetics in recovering relationships that morphology alone gets wrong.

Finally, the writing itself is an obstacle that cannot be separated from the argument. Sentences run to great length with multiple subordinate qualifications, referents drift, and key claims arrive in clauses rather than in statements. A reader willing to work will find recurring themes — the priority of volume over line, of the longitudinal over the transverse, of death over birth as the organizing pole — but will not find the steps by which one follows from another. The paper is best read as a programmatic essay in philosophical anthropology: a statement of what a non-abstracting description of nature would have to avoid, rather than a demonstration that such a description has been achieved.